Marine Conservation - South Australia

Thursday, Jan 24, 2019

Google heavy-hitter uses drones in SA marine conservation

Former Google Australia engineering director Alan Noble commuted to Sydney from Adelaide for 11 years and oversaw his department grow from 20 engineers to 650. Now he is heavily involved in creating technology to lower the financial costs of marine science and conservation. Marine conservation primarily refers to the study of conserving physical and biological marine resources and ecosystem functions. It is the protection and preservation of ecosystems in oceans and seas through planned management in order to prevent the exploitation of these resources.

Alan and his not for profit organisation, AusOcean, have built low cost underwater marine cameras and are in the process of building low cost hydrophones to make underwater marine sound recordings. AusOcean are also investigating the use of remote operable drones to undertake large scale marine surveys quicker and more efficiently than currently practices allow.

In partnership with the University of Adelaide and The Nature Conservancy Australia, AusOcean, are designing and building an underwater sensor network to assist with the restoration of Windarra Reef off the Yorke Peninsula in South Australia. This project is being undertaken is to bring back a locally extinct extinct shellfish called the Angasi oyster, which once thrived on the South Australian reef in the 1800s.